Thursday, 17 March 2016

Gdes2014 Lakeside Visit & Mobiles and Origami Workshop

We undertook various this week - including a crucial visit to the new UW Lakeside site where we were given a short refresher talk by the facility's manager Rob Delahay and a walk/talk around the key areas of the site. With reference to the "Children's Bushcraft" brief we looked at both the wooded strip of land at the far end of the site where activities are due to take place - as well as the various lakes and wildlife on site. In addition to this we also had a go at creating mobiles and origami shapes - taking 2D paper elements and moving them into 3D - this being part of the assessed brief this year and the eActivity book planned.Additional ref this week: Project Wild Thing (2013)A recent film that seeks to examine why we as a society are becoming more and more distanced from the outdoors.Although not entirely the reason for it, the film also makes the point that our children's generation today are the first generation to have a LOWER life expectancy than the previous generation (this also links to childhood obesity, inactivity, diet, sugar, etc, etc).

UW Lakeside pictures:

Rob's quick refresher talk with Q+A.

The strip of woods in which there'll eventually be clearings, campfire sites and spaces for shelters and tents etc for the anticipated Children's Bushcraft activities..

Getting an idea of the scale of the site by walking it's periphery. There will ultimately be various other pitches and running tracks laid out here too.

Some of this week's group of visiting students from the Gdes2010 Graphic Information Design and Gdes2014 Children's Book Design modules.

A pair of Mallards - just some of the various types of wildlife on and around the site's lakes area.

Students walk through the site's lakes area.

Examples of work and outputs from this week's mobiles and origami workshop:

Students examining their peers' rough work and research to date this week.

Students busy creating mobiles from test sheets.

Suspended natural world mobile. Students could make one of these as part of this semester's brief and maybe add 'found' materials as part of a game for children on site.

After about an hour's experimenting these are some of the examples of ideas coming through from the workshop.